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Can churches pick up where state welfare systems fall short? April Burbank (@aprilburbank) explains how David Anderson's Safe Families for Children program, powered by a network of volunteers, is answering the prayers of families in crisis.

Child psychologist David Anderson couldn’t sleep. He was haunted by stories—stories of child abuse and neglect that he’d heard from children at a Chicago hospital, and stories of parents who couldn’t find anyone to take care of their children when their families were going through crisis situations, including illness, unemployment, drug or alcohol rehabilitation, or incarceration.

Later, when Anderson was working as the director of a child welfare organization in Chicago, mothers came to him and asked him to take care of their kids. He couldn’t help them, except to refer them to government agencies in cases of abuse, and even then, he knew that families had a low chance of being reunited after children entered foster care.

The welfare system designed to intervene wasn’t doing enough, and families were falling through the cracks.

“I remember losing sleep and just thinking, there’s got to be a different way,” said Anderson. “The way the system is set up is that the state can’t intervene unless something bad has happened. … Why in the world don’t we figure out how do we support that parent so that nothing happens?”

Like many social entrepreneurs, Anderson wanted to find a way to help the people the system ignored. He found a way, starting in his own home.

“This one mom just shook my arm and she said, ‘You don’t understand. Something bad is going to happen if you don’t take my kids,’ ” he said. Anderson and his family took care of that woman’s children, free of charge, without any intention of adoption. He told the mother that she could have her children back at any time, as soon as she felt able. And it worked.

“Then I thought, well, what if we could find hundreds of people to do this?” Anderson said. “If we can intervene by providing a safe place for kids, pull them out, and help the parent to change the trajectory of their life, then we can avoid child abuse. We can avoid foster care.”

Ten years later, Anderson is an Ashoka Fellow who runs the Chicago-based program Safe Families for Children, which connects families in need with pre-screened homes where children can stay for an average of six weeks while their parents maintain full custody. It’s a simple idea, an echo of a time when neighbors took care of each other’s children.

David Anderson partners with churches to scale-up his impact

Now Safe Families for Children is re-building the model through local churches, which recruit and train local families to form a community safety net.

Why churches? “Throughout history, it was the church who was responsible for the most vulnerable people group in our society, and that’s the children,” said Anderson, who is a Christian. “I think in most states there’s a recognition that the faith community should be an important partner in helping families. I think a lot of churches struggle with what should that be.”

Anderson said that some churches rely on donation drives and other outreach methods that don’t necessarily have long-term impacts. But taking care of a vulnerable child, as opposed to simply feeding them for a day, can change the entire trajectory of a family’s life. “We would like the church to be the go-to place when families are in difficult situations,” he said.

The program works with 900 host families in the Chicago area alone, and Anderson says they’re bigger than any nearby foster care agency. The state of Illinois provides funding and refers families in need, and Safe Families for Children screens, approves and trains families who volunteer to help. Anderson estimates that last year his network of family volunteers made room for about 1,000 children in the Chicago area alone.

The walls of Anderson’s office are covered with white boards, and his plans for Safe Families are scrawled from floor to ceiling on maps and long to-do lists. Scaling isn’t just a buzzword for Anderson; he has an all-consuming passion for spreading his idea. “I don’t give up … I just think about it night and day,” he said.

He has spread Safe Families to 65 cities around the country, even prompting changes to laws in Oregon and Wisconsin to allow the program to launch. It also operates at sites in Canada and the United Kingdom.

His goal is not only to provide safe places for children to stay—it’s also to broaden the way that churches think about hospitality for the most vulnerable.

“I think churches want to be helpful. … They want to make impact,” he said. “I think sometimes they just don’t know what to do, and they’re not experts, so providing an on-ramp for that makes a huge difference.”